EVENTS

Sheep this way, goats that way

Zinnia Jones is rightly resentful when a blogger who goes by the name “the atheist asshole” calls her “one of the good ones”. They’re missing the truth: while she’s all straightforward and civil and all that, she’s also one of our top bad-asses on Freethoughtblogs.

Oh, I know who that is – “the atheist asshole” – that’s Anton A Hill, the one who did a forty nineteen* minute video about me because I told him to fuck off on Twitter, and then went on and on and on and on sniping at me about it, for weeks. So I read Zinnia’s post that PZ linked.

If you’ve ever favorably contrasted me against other trans people or atheists or queer folks or anyone else like me, just because I’ve been quiet when they’ve been outspoken in the face of wrongdoing, or I was overly patient and indulgent of ignorance when they’ve been rightfully terse: fuck you.

Stop it. I don’t want your support or approval. I am not on your side. I am not one of you. I want to be like them – not like you. I don’t want to be one of your “good ones”.

Especially when the “you” in question is…well, an asshole. (Hey, that’s what he calls himself.)

I’ll define this type of situation by way of example. A few months back, I was mentioned on Anton A. Hill’s blog in a list of several people with whom he’d recently had productive conversations on issues like feminism and trans stuff. In my case, this was because I happened to be in a friendly mood when he asked me a question that involved the phrase “born w/ a peepee”.

This was just one instance of a pattern that was repeated throughout the post: his surprise that his criticism of Freethought Blogs as a whole was handled calmly by NonStampCollector, or that a member of Secular Woman “respected” his “right to disagree with her” on issues of feminism (as if how people regard a man’s opinion of feminism is in any way connected to individual rights and freedoms), or that Marisa Gallego “maintained politeness” when he “downright called her on her shit” in their discussion of trans matters.

I’ll ask you to take a moment and think about which of these people you expect I’d be more inclined to align myself with – him, or the people who graciously “maintained politeness” when addressing his “born w/ a peepee”-level views on these issues.

Reading this post made me rather suspicious of what he was aiming to convey. As I found out by the end, it was nothing good: he capped it all off with vague criticism of fellow FTBer Ophelia Benson, and how his experiences with her had led him to suspect that all our conversations would descend into a “vicious, name-calling flame war”. We were the good ones… so who were the bad ones? In his estimation, she was.

I have to say that with each of the above-referenced conversations, not only did I not expect anything going into them, but based on my conversation with my Best Friend and Biggest Fan (BFaBF) Ophelia Benson, I actually assumed that all conversations would end up in some kind of vicious, name-calling flame war. I’m so glad, then, that my initial fears were completely debunked and that some mutual insight developed.

Best Friend and Biggest Fan, see, first prize in the Cannes Sarcasm Festival, because his first interaction with me was to pick a fight and everything after that was to call me names for telling him to fuck off when he picked a fight with me.

Atheist assholes, confirming the theists’ worst prejudices every day.

*Update: nineteen, not forty. I must have been thinking of the subsequent podcast in which Hill told two or three of his loudmouth obnoxious dudebro friends how horrible I am. That segment added to the video would probably be close to forty, but the video was “only” nineteen. Nineteen minutes is still a lot of minutes to lavish on a brief Twitter exchange with a stranger.

I clicked the link. There’s already a response to Zinnia’s callout post. It’s full of some pretty disgusting trans* jokes. Yay. Also sounds eerily similar to the BS that ‘Mark R’ has been spreading around the ‘An Asshole Posted’ thread. I feel like I’m caught in an asshole Mobius strip today.

I dislike the atheist asshole enough to be pleased with the response posts about this have gotten. Yes, only 3 comments here after 24+ hours is good: Anton’s seven months of sniping hasn’t been good enough to make more than a ripple.

That’s second post, jen, was awful, wasn’t it? Even if he hadn’t gone with the trans* jokes and the imagined white male privilege of Zinnia, tt has enough holes in its whiny incivility to accommodate a fleet of trucks. Only the hardest of hard liners from the mildewed crowd and its periphery will comment on it, and they have to follow him into the Twilight Zone of Ignorance to do it.